This invention is generally directed to a system for enclosing materials, such as poultry, hams, or other materials, in netting and applying a handle and a label to the package.
The food industry often wishes to place products in nets. For example, large fowl, particularly turkeys, are encased in a plastic, see-through wrapper, for sanitary reasons, and then enclosed in netting for package integrity and ease of handling. The netting provides a strong structure to hold the turkey and allows the consumer to see the packaged material. It is important that the netting be tight around the package, to provide a pleasing appearance to consumers. There is a marketing advantage to having tightly-netted packages.
Nets are also applied to other food products, such as poultry, hams, sausages, or cheeses, prior to further processing, such as smoking.
In many cases, a handle is also applied to the package. Sausages and hams are enclosed in netting prior to cooking or smoking. The use of a handle is mandated, as there must be some way to handle the product in the cooking or smoking apparatus. The handles on these products are generally discarded after processing.
The handle is also useful to workers and customers in retail establishments, especially when the product is frozen, to make it easier to grab the product. A handle facilitates maneuvering the products, such as moving the products in and out of display cases, through check-out lanes, or in and out of the consumer's own refrigerator or freezer. Additionally, some consumers prefer to use a handle in order to avoid touching the package itself. Accordingly, there is a marketing advantage to having a handle on the product. In the case of turkeys or other poultry, it is important that the handle be applied at the rear-most point of the birds, which is where the legs point, to provide a pleasing appearance to purchasers.
Most of the same products also have a label of some type applied to the product. The label displays such data as weight, price per unit of weight, and total price. Other data, such as lot numbers, batch identification, product identification, or expiration date, are also common. The label can also contain identification information such as brand names or logos.
Netting is manufactured in a long, continuous tube, usually of a hard thermoplastic but also from natural fibers. The prior art method of enclosing a turkey in netting was to clip one end of the netting tube, place the turkey in the tube, manually pull the netting tightly around the turkey, clip the open end to enclose the turkey in the netting, and cut the netting. If a handle was desired, the additional step was, after the netting was pulled around the turkey, to form a loop while holding the netting tightly against the turkey, clip the netting at the close of the loop, and cut the netting.
This prior art method was labor intensive. Additionally, it was difficult to obtain uniform tightness of netting. Additionally, the method requires quite a bit of manual pulling and wrapping, making hand fatigue and injuries common.
Prior art methods to automate the process have been unsuccessful. One method used clippers built into gathering plates, but that method was awkward and slow because the gathering plates had to move. Since an opening must be at least 14 inches to accommodate the largest turkeys, the gathering plates had to move at least seven inches and, to be practical, had to move more like 10 inches. Accordingly, they were big, heavy, and slow. The prior art automated processes also worked only for consistently-sized turkeys. Application of a predetermined length of netting had to be based on the largest turkeys available. If the predetermined length of netting was sufficient to enclose the largest turkeys, however, all smaller turkeys would be netted loosely, which caused a marketing disadvantage.
Clippers as known in the prior art used a knife edge to sever the netting. For woven netting, if the knife edge does not completely sever all strands of the netting, a trailing strand of netting will hang from the clipped end of the package. Additionally, incomplete severing of the netting can cause strands of woven netting to pull through the netting, leaving a trailing strand. This problem occurs most frequently with netting made from natural fibers, especially cotton, but the problem also arises with netting made from other materials. This problem arises in automated netters, such as the one described herein, as well as in manual netters described above.
These trailing edges cause contamination problems in, for example, smokehouses. Packaged and netted food products, such as hams, turkeys, cheeses, and sausages, are often hung on racks and moved from a packaging room to a smokeroom. It is paramount to prevent cross-contamination between the two rooms. Although the smoking process will kill some bacteria, other bacteria thrive on heat and will multiply rapidly in a smokeroom. Accordingly, the racks are usually suspended from tracks hung from the ceiling, so there are no wheels to pick up bacteria from the floor of the packaging room. Additionally, workers pushing the racks from the packaging room to the smokeroom, or otherwise traveling between the two rooms, are required to step through a bleach trough, to remove any contamination from their shoes.
If there are strands of netting hanging from the products suspended on the racks, those strands can drag on the floor of the packaging room and likely will pick up bacterial contamination. That contamination can travel up the strand, especially with netting made from natural fibers. The bleach trough may not completely remove this contamination.
To solve this problem, food processors station an extra employee between the packaging room and the smokeroom, to sever any trailing strands of netting with scissors. This method adds to the labor cost of an otherwise highly-automated process.
Accordingly, there is a need for an apparatus and method of encasing material such as turkeys or hams, in netting, that will reduce labor costs by reducing the amount of labor required, easing the tasks of the workers that are required, provide a pleasing appearance to consumers, and prevent contamination of food products during processing such as smoking. There is also a need for an apparatus and method of encasing material such as turkeys or hams, in netting, that will provide a loop in the netting to act as a handle, for subsequent processing or for consumer use. There is also a need for an apparatus and method of applying a label with identifying data, as part of the same netting process. The present invention meets these needs.